Men and Women in Space

All this talk about what sort of societies will be
around when space colonization takes off seem kind of
like ancient fish discussing what sort of creatures
would evolve from the fish that crawled out of the
oceans.

I think it was Al Globus who calculated that
dismantling Ceres and turning it into a bunch of
Island 3 colonies would yield something like 300 to
500 times the surface area of the earth. Although we
might be able to predict what the very first colonies
would be like in a general way (ie small), once
humanity gets around to building Island 3s and
dismantling the largest asteroids, there is no way
we'll be able to predict the way that a trillion
people on a million space colonies will order their
societies. Hell, we won't be able to predict how the
first 100 small colonies (by small I mean less than 10
thousand people) will order their societies.

If someone is writing a story about life in a space
colony, then the politics and culture of that colony
would be entirely up to the author's imagination.
There would only be a few things that every colony
would have to have - all of them practical
considerations dictated by the environment. They
would have to keep their air inside. They'd have to
maintain their radiation shielding. They'd have to
have some sort of an ecosystem to recycle air, water,
and food. They'd need resupply to cover the
inevitable losses. They'd need to protect themselves
from other people. They'd have to have some way of
dealing with all the other stuff in orbit to prevent
collisions (whether with another colony or with an
asteroid or comet). They would have to have a supply
of energy, either solar power or nuclear. And there
would likely be trade and tourism between the colonies
and earth.

And all the while, science and engineering would keep
advancing, bringing with them new technologies that
change the societies, sometimes rapidly. Just look at
how the internet has changed the world over the last
ten to fifteen years, or how the automobile changed
western society in the last century.

Ed Minchau
http://robot_guy.blogspot.com

--- victoriatangoman wrote: